Steven Saylor - The judgement of Caesar

I put my hand on his shoulder to show him that I understood. He held the bronze urn to his chest and bowed his head over it, tears in his eyes, then turned and began to walk upriver. Afraid they might run after him and disturb him, I called to Androcles and Mopsus to come join me.

Bethesda, meanwhile, had reached the overgrown copse of trees downriver and had been searching for a means of entry. While I watched, she finally located a pathway. Not bothering to look back, she stepped into the foliage and disappeared from sight.

"Come along, boys!" I said, and followed after her.

I reached the copse, and stood baffled before the spot where I had last seen her. Was it possible a pathway had opened and then closed up behind her? Wherever I looked, reeds grew out of the muddy ground, and a tangle of vines hung down to meet them, without any perceptible break.

I called her name. She made no answer.

I searched the soft ground for her footprints. I finally found them, taken aback at how light were the tread marks she left, compared not merely with my footsteps, but also with those of the boys. Truly, in the last few days she had dwindled and faded, so that now she walked upon the earth as lightly as a child.

"She must have gone this way," said Mopsus, staring at the ground.

"No, this way!" insisted Androcles.

"Both of you, step back, before you confuse the track any further," I said, and then I followed her steps back and forth, retracing her faltering search for a way into the copse. I finally found it; a tangle of vines hung just so, obscuring the entrance completely unless one approached it from the correct angle.

"Bethesda!" I called, stepping into the copse.

The boys followed me and recommenced their bickering. "I told you it was this way," said Mopsus.

"No, you didn't! You said…" Androcles fell silent as the dappled shadows abruptly closed in around us. The boys sensed what I sensed: that we had entered a place that was not like other places. The gurgling of the river could be heard from nearby, along with the low buzzing of insects and the cries of birds in the treetops.

Ahead, through hanging vines, I glimpsed sunlight on stone. We came to a glade circled by vegetation but open to the sky. The little temple in its midst was lit by a shaft of sunlight; the shaft was so clouded with motes of dust that it seemed a solid thing, and I should not have been surprised to see dragonflies suspended motionless within its light, held fast like insects in amber. But the dragonflies hovered and flitted unimpeded, making way for Bethesda, who approached the temple, mounted the short flight of steps to the colonnaded porch, and disappeared inside.

The temple was of Egyptian design, with a flat roof, squat columns surmounted by capitals carved like lotus leaves, and worn hieroglyphs in riotous profusion on every surface. It betrayed no hint of Greek influence, and so almost certainly predated the conquest of Alexander and the reign of the Ptolemies. It was hundreds, possibly thousands of years old; older than Alexandria, older than Rome, perhaps as old as the Pyramids. Beside it, from a jumble of fern-covered stones, a spring trickled forth, forming a tiny pool.

The spring was life itself; the spring accounted for this lush oasis beside the variable banks of the Nile, and for the sacred spell exerted by the place, and for the temple erected beside it. I gazed at the hieroglyphs on the temple; I listened to the faint gurgle of the spring; I felt warm sunlight on my shoulders, but I shivered, for the place seemed uncannily familiar. I raised a finger to my lips, instructing the boys to maintain their silence, and walked across the clearing to the steps of the temple.

I smelled the perfume of burning myrrh. From within I heard the murmur of two voices. One of them belonged to Bethesda. The other voice might have been male or female; I could not tell. I mounted the steps to the porch, inclined my head toward the opening, and squinted at the gloom within. In brief, uncertain flashes, a flickering lamp illuminated brightly painted walls covered with strange images and glyphs. The grandest of these images was that of the god Osiris: the figure of a tall man swathed in white mummy wrapping, holding a flail and crook in his crossed arms and wearing on his head the atef crown, a tall white cone adorned with ostrich feathers on each side and with a small golden disk at the bulbous top.

I heard the voices from within more clearly, but the language they spoke was strange to me-not any version of Egyptian of which I had any knowledge. To hear Bethesda's voice uttering such alien sounds sent a shiver up my spine; it was as if some other being had claimed her voice, some creature foreign to me. I made no move to enter the temple, but stayed where I was on the threshold.

From inside, the priestess of the place-for little by little I had decided the voice must be that of a woman-took up a chant. The chant grew louder, until I knew the boys must be able to hear it as well. I looked behind me and saw them at the edge of the glade, rooted to the spot, their eyes trained on the opening of the temple, their mouths shut.

How long the chanting lasted I had no way of knowing, for it cast a spell on all of us. Time stopped; even the motes of dust in the air ceased their slow, swirling dance, and the dragonflies, afraid of its magic, dispersed. I closed my eyes and tried to discern whether the chanting carried some message of healing and hope, for had Bethesda not come here to find a cure for her malady? But the words were strange to me, and the feeling the chant inspired in me was not of hope but of resignation. Resignation to what? Not to the Fates or Fortune, but to something even older than those; to whatever unseen force metes out our measure of life beneath the sun.

The gods of Egypt are older than the gods of Rome. A Roman who comes to Egypt finds himself far away from the gods he knows, at the mercy of forces older than life itself, powers that have no names because they existed before men could give them names. I felt stripped of all pretensions to wisdom and worldliness; I was naked before the universe, and I trembled.

The chanting ceased. There was movement within the temple. A silhouette emerged from its uncertain light, and in the next moment Bethesda stood before me.

"It's time," she said.

"Time?"

"For me to bathe in the Nile."

"This temple-you've been here before?"

She nodded. "I know this place."

"But how?"

"Perhaps my mother brought me here once, when I was child. I'm not sure. Perhaps I've only seen it before in dreams. But it's just as I remember it-or dreamed it."

"It seems to me that I must have been here before, too. But that's impossible."

"Perhaps this is a place everyone sees in dreams, whether they remember those dreams or not." Bethesda seemed satisfied with this explanation, for she smiled very faintly. "I must bathe in the river now, Husband."

I stepped aside to let her pass. "I'll come with you," I said.

"No. The wisewoman says that I should go alone."

"The wisewoman?"

A figure stepped from the shadows from which Bethesda had emerged. It was an old woman wearing a simple linen gown with a ragged woolen mantle draped over her shoulders, despite the heat of the day. Her hair was white, pulled into a knot at the back of her head. Her skin was like ancient wood, burned dark by the sun and carved with deep wrinkles. She wore no jewelry. Her gnarled hands, clutching the woolen mantle, looked very small. So did her feet. Her sandals were ragged and worn. A cat, its sleek fur as black as night, followed the old woman out of the shadows and rubbed itself against her ankles.

"Did my wife make a sufficient offering?" I reached toward the coin purse in my pouch.

The woman held up her hand. "The god requires no offering to satisfy your wife's request."